Promo text

As her eighteenth birthday draws near, werewolf Katie knows it’s only a matter of time before her secrets and treacherous past come to light. Terrified that her adopted pack and the only boy she’s ever loved will be caught in the crossfire, Katie Clay does the only thing she knows to keep them safe. She runs.

After leaving the girl he wanted for his mate back in Rock Falls, Beta Donovan Hazelton’s life has come to an awkward standstill, filled with pressures he can’t escape.

When circumstances beyond their control shove them together and leave them devoid of options, Donovan and Katie must trek across the country and take matters into their own hands. With a merciless enemy and unexpected attraction nipping at their heels, they’ll have one chance to make an end of Katie’s past.

If they fail, it will be the end of them.

Tropes

Dark and troubled past Katie. She’s been adopted into this pack of werewolves after being found on the verge of death due to fighting within her own pack when she was 13. The factions within that fight still exist out there, and she desperately wants to avoid them.

Ethical orphan Despite all that Katie has been through, she’s still a nice person, like that sweet younger sister everyone loves to have around.

Found family The Hazeltons. They’ve adopted Katie Clay and she’s found happiness.

Guilt complex Donovan, over having had anAccidental smooch with a long-time friend who’d had a crush on him for a while. The this-is-all-my-fault moaning fills up several chapters and is the beginning of the romantic plot.

You sexy beast In this world, werewolves are sexy.

Superpower oops Donovan fails to survey his surroundings before shifting into a werewolf and is seen by a teenaged girl who screams. This requires him to leave town for several weeks, fleeing across the country with Katie, whom he didn’t really want to be that close to because of the earlier Accidental smooch. But this book also has Forced proximity and the oops leads to more sparks flying.

Secret heiress Katie. Her evil relatives want not only to kill her, but also want to gain control of her parents’ money, which she hasn’t touched. They can’t reach that money if she stays in hiding.

Heartbroken badass Donovan. Immediately prior to the book’s opening, he’d won the right to marry the pretty werewolf from another pack in some kind of ritual fighting thing that didn’t appear to kill anyone. But then he realized she wasn’t that into him, so he relinquished his rights to her and is thus moping when the girl when the girl who’s been crushing on him for years…

Noble sacrifice Katie, almost. And then the first five paragraphs of the next chapter makes you believe that she’s dead, a nice, aggravating author fake-out.

Alternate morality Werewolves don’t dial 911 when there’s a disturbance. Conflict resolution seems to involve lots of dead bodies. 

Accidental smooch Donovan comes home a Heartbroken badass and is not thinking very clearly when Katie just happens to be there to check on him and a kiss that takes several breathless paragraphs to describe occurs. This becomes the inciting incident for the whole book as he tries and fails to repress his feelings for Katie.

Rejection leads to reformation Katie, having just had a major increase in confidence, doesn’t just want her longtime crush, Donovan, to want her. She says no, you have to court me.

Nobody says or does the f-word This book comes from a press that has a bio on the CEO that includes: “She’s here for all the kissing but likes the door to shut around second base,” and I think the CEO and the author is the same person. Also I found this book at the Realm Makers convention, an event for Christian authors in the sci-fi / fantasy genre. But the werewolves don’t seem to believe in a god, not even howling at the moon in a spiritual-but-not-religious sort of way. But the characters do a good job of keeping their mouths clean while dealing with people who want to kill them, and they also abstain from any talk about what happens during estrus or what direction wolves’ tails will point when they’re thinking about you-know-what. And they avert their eyes from each other while shifting from werewolf back into human form and changing into clothing that somehow has followed them while they were werewolves. So it’s a clean book, yes sir.

Forced Proximity Katie and Donovan have feelings for each other but they can’t be together because of complicated issues of werewolf succession. Or at least I think that’s the problem. But when Donovan has to leave town for a while due to his Superpower oops and Katie flees because she doesn’t want her Found family to be hurt by her Dark and troubled past that’s resurging because of her coming eighteenth birthday, the Hazeltons decide to send them out into the world together with instructions to lie low. Of course this doesn’t work and they have to spend an awful lot of time together saving each other.